People attend conferences and events for education, entertainment and engagement – a desire to engage in meaningful conversation with other attendees and with presenters.
Gary Vaynerchuck’s presentation at LeWeb sparked a blog post on Why Livestreaming your conference is a no-brainer. His followup interview with Gianfranco Chicco extended my thinking on the value of the conference / event experience to attendees.
Perhaps the highlight of Gary’s presentation at Le Web was his interaction with Loic LeMeur, founder and host of Le Web who said: “[Le Web] is not a conference, it’s a community” to which Gary exploded with this remark “If this is a f*%king community, why aren’t we doing Q&A?!”
I highly recommend checking out Gary’s full conversation with @Loic but be prepared, if you haven’t seen Gary Vee before, he uses the #F word at least a half dozen times in his presentation.
The future of Conferences
Successful Events can be measured by how successfully they balance the three E’s.
Education,
Entertainment
Engagement
Technology has made access to information free. Education can help attendees put the ideas and information to use in a meaningful hands-on sort of way. This demands smaller breakout group sizes and meaningful interaction with presenters. This is why the unconference / barcamp learning environment has been such a successful event formula.
The Q & A forum advocated for by @garyvee is a good one, and the ability of the presenter to dance on their feet and provide great value for the audience will require recruiting speakers who know their stuff backwards and forwards, understand the needs of their audience and are comfortable in a “Bring it on” environment.
This clearly isn’t the entire spectrum of presenters who took the stage at #leweb, or any other conference or event you have recently attended. Some of the brightest lights in social media and tourism – sadly, are poor presenters on stage and do not engage their audience.
Entertainment and Performance Matter too
Gary’s points taken into consideration, some presentations are performances. Lawrence Lessig comes to mind. Give me a front row seat for one of Larry’s presentations and I don’t want to interact or engage with him. Although the online version of his presentations will fail to fully capture the value he brings to every presentation I urge you to give him a few minutes to see what the Stanford Law professor brings to the stage. We need more like him.
Rethinking Conferences and Events: Put the Three E’s front and center
I think the large conference / event format itself may be broken. Smaller breakout groups are really valuable and providing access for Q & A and authentic engagement is much more valuable than panel discussions because attendees can get exactly what they came for.
Big names will put bums in seats, but the measures of success that matter most to attendees will always be the richness of audience engagement and off-stage social interactions.
Are your attendees getting the education, entertainment and engagement they desire? Consider asking this question to gauge feedback at your next event:
The idea of charging a fee for video and audio from conferences and events is old, and comes from the days of charging for tapes of presentations as a way of boosting revenue from live events. Those days are over.
Today, sitting in little old South River, Ontario, Canada I’m watching the live streaming event LeWeb from Paris France – for free. Not everyone can afford to travel to conferences and not everyone can attend your event each year. By letting participants peak into your conference on their computer, you build your event reputation, entice future attendees and earn fans far beyond the walls of your event.
Events like LeWeb and Web 2.0 Conference put some of the brightest lights in the tech industry on stage for their audience and give away the content. These events gain a wide audience and inspire people to consider attending in person and make it more enticing for presenters to offer their services at little or no cost.
These events and others like Phocuswright Conference for Tourism Industry earn income by providing a stage for start-ups to showcase their businesses. Unlike others, Phocuswright charges a fee for access to streaming and on-demand video. This insulates conference content from those who don’t pay for access, and offers less exposure for the people and businesses that take the stage.
Growing your brand exposure by giving away the proceedings, earns free promotion for your event from people “Outside the Walls” who:
tweet about happenings with your hash tags (even though they are not there)
broadcast the news and info and crediting your event
tell others about what they learn
blog about ideas they see and hear
link back to your event
attend future events
In this regard your event might consider moving the cost of video production from an expense that will produce income (selling access to video from your event) to a Public Relations and Promotions expense that will grow future attendance at your events.
Ask Yourself: How can I extend my brand and involve people who can’t be here?
Why Live Streaming your Event is a no brainer:
Audience members can stream your event themselves today for FREE. Apple yesterday approved the Ustream Live Broadcaster application for iPhone. Now anyone with an iPhone 3G can live stream video straight from the iPhone to the Ustream Web site. That video can be embedded in other Web pages for free. When audience members are holding up their phones, they are no longer just snapping photos, but sending video of your conference or event to others on the Web.
The Ustream.tv Live Broadcasting app works on both 3G cell phone connections as well as Wi-Fi. It supports audience interaction with chatroom messaging and polling of viewers and allows uploading video to Youtube and Facebook. Ustream Live is available in the iTunes store for FREE here
Other apps like Qik Video for iPhone (and other smartphone devices) has submitted its app for approval to the iTunes store as well. This app permits instant updates of Video broadcasting via Facebook, Twitter and other social media.
All information is already free. The information attendees gather from your event will be publically available around the world before your speakers even step off stage. There is virtually no information that Google can’t provide, but for the sake of a couple of keystrokes.
Information presented at your event is already old. The Web is changing so quickly that information has a “Best Before” date stamped on it that expires before the signs are taken down and the stage is packed away.
If they can get it for free, why would anyone come to your event?
The truth is, most people don’t come to your event for the conference proceedings and presentations. They come to socialize with other attendees and presenters. The biggest value you bring to attendees is the opportunity to build face to face relationships. If your event doesn’t gain renown for the face to face interactions that take place in between presentations, you have a bigger problem than ubiquitous live streaming video.
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